Saturday, April 21, 2012

My usual plays with Wordle and word clouds use extracts from my genealogy management software, so this was a different sort of an exercise. Since I've been spending the last week on a series of posts regarding the Titanic, and specifically the fate of Washington A. Roebling II, I decided to use those posts as the basis for tonight's word cloud.

I've been using Evernote to draft the series before pasting in Blogger. I have all of the posts in a single Evernote document, along with other assorted notes as I've done my research. I copied the text of the Titanic series posts from Sunday, April 15, 2012 - Friday, April 20, 2012.

My first pass at this was using the entire text of each post, including citations. But since I've been depending fairly heavily on the Trenton Evening Times via GenealogyBank, thought the first Wordle cloud generated reflected the source citations too much.

What I wanted was something that more accurately reflected the content of the stories so I could see which names and words stood out. I went back for a second pass, this time removing the citations and leaving only the text of the posts. I'm fairly please with the results (below):

Most of the names of people mentioned in the series are easily visible (at least to me), and I think the general content of the series overall is captured decently. I selected the "Mostly Horizontal" option to lay out the words, removed common words and numbers, and used the "Kenyan Coffee" font with "Blue meets Orange" color scheme.